Past Events

Developmental Language Disorder in Mandarin-Chinese Children: Behavioral Manifestation and Assessment Approaches

Developmental Language Disorder in Mandarin-Chinese Children: Behavioral Manifestation and Assessment Approaches Speaker: Dr Sheng Li (Associate Professor Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Delaware) Overview: Seven percent of children are affected by developmental language disorder (DLD), which causes unexplained difficulties in learning one’s native (and subsequent) language(s). Our current understanding regarding the linguistic and cognitive profiles of DLD in Mandarin is extremely limited. This not only is incommensurate with the large number of Mandarin-speaking children

Understanding Language Development and Developmental Language Disorder from Language Sample Analyses

Understanding Language Development and Developmental Language Disorder from Language Sample Analyses Speaker: Dr Anita Wong (Director of Clinical Education (2015-2020) Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences, The University of Hong Kong) Overview: Speech-language therapists (SLT) conduct norm-referenced tests and informal observation, and use clinical judgement to make diagnosis of DLD. Before therapy, the SLT will typically collect a conversational sample of the child’s language, and systematically analyze his/her grammar. From the language sample, the SLT can identify error productions, and productions that are not expected for the child’s age. From these productions, the SLT conduct criterion-referenced probes and identify grammatical targets for therapy. In this talk, I will describe

Oracle Bone Inscriptions – A Pivotal Link in Building Chinese Civilization

Oracle Bone Inscriptions – A Pivotal Link in Building Chinese Civilization Speaker: Prof. Chen Kuang Yu (Distinguished Professor Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University) Overview: Jiaguwen 甲骨文 was discovered 120 years ago by Wang Yirong 王懿榮 in 1899. The term Jiaguwen 甲骨文 (Oracle bone inscriptions, OBI) refers to scripts engraved on oracle bones, mostly for divination and events recording. Hundreds of thousands of oracle bones have been unearthed during the last century. The inscriptions represent not only the earliest known Chinese

Sinogram and the Brain 漢字與大腦

Sinogram and the Brain 漢字與大腦 Speaker: Dr. Peng Gang (Associate Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong) Overview: The two most distinct features of the Chinese language are the use of lexical tones in its spoken form and sinograms, i.e., Chinese characters, in its written form. In this talk, I will report three aspects of sinogram processing based on our previous studies. 1. Firstly, I will discuss

‘Perfective paradox’: A Cross-linguistic Study of the Aspectual Functions of –guo in Mandarin Chinese

‘Perfective paradox’: A Cross-linguistic Study of the Aspectual Functions of –guo in Mandarin Chinese Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li (Head of Department Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: The toneless aspect mark -guo is generally viewed as a perfective marker with experiential function. It appears to be subject to a number of semantic constraints, such as discontinuity, repeatability or recurrence, reversibility, and indefinite reference. This article demonstrates that ‘experiential’ is only one of the three main local functions of -guo. Crucial to the determination of the local function of a -guo clause is the boundedness of the verb constellation: ‘experiential’

The Perfective in Modern Standard Chinese: Contexts and Degree

The Perfective in Modern Standard Chinese: Contexts and Degree Speaker: Prof. Chaofen Sun (Stanford University) Overview: The verbal suffix了1 has been treated as an aspect marker (Wang 1965) meaning “perfective”完成 (Chao 1968, Lu & Zhu1979, Smith 1997), “realization”实现 (Liu 1988), or “complete” (Chen 2008), etc. No matter what it is named, its semantics is related to the semantic notion of boundedness. Wu (2005) proposed a SigP to account for 了1’s distributions. However, such a claim fails to explain why the 了 in 我吃完*(了)⼀一碗饭 “I have eaten a bowl of rice” is obligatory as the event with the RVC 吃完 is necessarily bounded. Tsai’s (2008) multi-level account claims that only Asp1 在 and 过 as head of the TP (了1 is Asp2) allows a sentence to stand without a quantified NP as its syntactic object. However, such a claim misses the fact that #我吃过饭 is just as awkward as #我吃了了饭. Both of these sentences cannot stand without a quantified NP or additional information. My study shows that the Chinese perfective marker

Chinese as a Complex Self-adaptive System: Some Preliminary Studies

Chinese as a Complex Self-adaptive System: Some Preliminary Studies Speaker: Prof. Chu-Ren Huang (Chair Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Complexity and complex systems have been central to the study of topics ranging from galaxies to genes. Language as a complex system has in turn been at the fore-front of language sciences (Beckner et al. 2009). I will start with the multiple meanings of the term ‘language’ to suggest that this fact could reflect the nature of language as a complex self-adaptive system. That is, as such a complex system at

Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language

Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language 18 Sep 2019 Event Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language Speaker: Prof. Sir Colin Blakemore (Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Neuroscience City University of Hong Kong Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience University of Oxford) Overview: How language evolved remains a crucial issue for understanding human cognition. I shall examine the still-dominant view that human beings have an innate (genetically specified) mental faculty for language. The functional specializations that are necessary for spoken and gestural communication are extensive and complex – in the larynx

Research Exploring Co-evolution of Tools and Language

Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language Speaker: Prof. P. Thomas Schoenemann (Professor Departments of Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University) Overview: The evolutionary process favors the elaboration and modification of pre-existing abilities. Bipedalism, for example, did not evolve via a wholesale replacement of existing anatomy and neural connections, but rather simply the modification of anatomical structures that had evolved for previous types of movement. However, once the hands were freed, this allowed for the further flowering

Language and Aging

Language and Aging Speaker: Dr. Jana Reifegerste (Brain & Language Lab, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC) Overview: Over the last century, the average human lifespan has doubled, rendering the effects of aging on cognition, including language, a vital research topic. Yet the study of the developmental trajectory of language processing has largely focused on comparing linguistic abilities between children and young adults, with less attention being paid to what